The present invention relates to the integration of business applications in an integrated business solutions computing environment. More specifically, the present invention relates to a dynamic user interface for integrating such business applications.
Businesses have typically used a variety of mechanisms to control and analyze business operations such as accounting, payroll, human resources, employee tracking, customer relations tracking, etc. Tools which provide these functions are often implemented using computer software. For example, a software package may manage business accounting, another software package might be responsible for receiving new orders, yet another software package will track warehouse inventory and still another package may handle order fulfillment and shipment. In another example, a business software package operated by one business will need to exchange data with a software package operated by another business to allow a business-to-business transaction to occur.
When business tools are implemented in software, it is not unusual for proprietary software packages to be responsible for each individual business task. However, this implementation is cumbersome and requires the same data to be entered in differing formats among the various business applications. In order to improve efficiency, integration applications have been developed which are used to integrate various elements of one business application with elements of another business application.
For example, if a software package which is used to obtain new orders includes objects (or “entities”) having data fields of the form CustomerNameLast and CustomerNameFirst, it is straightforward to map those entries to accounting software having entities the data fields BillingAddressFirst and BillingAddressLast. In such an integration system, the relationship between entities in one system (i.e., computer system or application) and entities in another system can be stored in tables. A system administrator can configure entity mapping between the systems by selecting between the various entities of the two systems.
In order to facilitate the entity mapping configuration performed by the system administrator, user interfaces are used which present the entity tables in a user friendly format. However, such a user interface is typically a custom solution which must be specifically coded for each integration application.